If Real Wives Were Treated Like TV Wives, Things Would Be Pretty Awful

Anyone who watches TV and spends time online knows that a lot of irrational hatred gets directed toward TV wives. But what would it look like if we treated real wives with the outrageous vitriol fictional ones often engender? Funny or Die set out to answer that question.

It's hard to think of television characters who generate more enthusiastic Internet hate than Betty Draper of "Mad Men" and Skyler White of "Breaking Bad," despite the fact that the former was married to a self-centered, philandering alcoholic and the latter to a borderline-psychopathic, murdering drug-dealer. Folks, we have a TV wife problem.

Anna Gunn, who played Skyler, even penned an op-ed for the New York Times about the experience of playing such a hated character. "My character, to judge from the popularity of Web sites and Facebook pages devoted to hating her, has become a flash point for many people’s feelings about strong, nonsubmissive, ill-treated women," she wrote. "Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender."

The line between people's real attitudes towards women and the outrageous ridicule TV wives provoke is likely blurrier than it's made out to be in the Funny or Die video. But we're hopeful that most police officers wouldn't call a man a "cool and interesting guy" and his wife a "real buzzkill" if they walked into a home and saw a corpse on the ground.